ABSTRACT
In an important sense, then, one of the fruits of Maoism in the West may well be post-structuralism. Or at least its anti-essentialist, “articulatory” bent, arguably the most useful aspect of the entire, hugely influential enterprise. And yet it is not so much that this issue has been unexplored as almost willfully denied, in the
West as in Laclau and Mouffe’s deconstructive genealogy of Marxist thought. By the later 1980s it became and remains rather bad form to refer positively to Maoism or Mao’s China. The complex record of Maoism in China and elsewhere admits a number of interpretations. But the erasing or demonization of it and the P.R.C. from important historical, political, and intellectual developments in the West is orientalism. A return to the essential distinction between an uncomprehending China and a rational West. This landmark poststructuralist text, then, does have to do with globalization in that it disavows but reveals the absent presence of Maoist theory and the Cultural Revolution: their impact on Western thought, which last was in itself in part animated by the great ideological and political ferment of the 1960s and 1970s and what is now disparagingly called Third Worldism. Notwithstanding the ultimately failed attempts of China and newly independent states across the Third World to delink from the capitalist world system, this era must be seen as a key moment within the history of globalization and internationalist political thought and culture. Even in the West today the impact of Maoism lives on and takes new, if often negative forms (as in DeLillo’s Mao II, news media, and so on). When current theoretical discourse turns to the study of globalization it necessarily if often unconsciously arrives with its past in tow, and more to the point here, with the residues of a “China” or “Maoism” on board. But if China, Maoism, and the P.R.C. were a marked and positive influence on theory in the past, they – as in Laclau and Mouffe’s later, piggybacking text – become a much less inspired, and frequently negative presence in current global work. In the concluding chapter of The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben turns to Tiananmen 1989 to demonstrate the actuality and worldliness of the new global situation and of his chief concept in the book: “whatever singularity” (84).8 The latter refers to a community without “determinate contents,” without a defining essence or identity, without “conditions of belonging,” and beyond any national ascription. Agamben’s project here is to find an ethics that can ground community, but one not based on ideology or, apparently, history. As with his later work, Agamben attempts to privilege ethics over politics, expressing a refusal of national belonging and the salience of the nation-state that clearly is shared somewhat later by Hardt and Negri’s work. This non-identitarian community of what he calls “the Chinese May” is, in his opinion, a new development to the extent that it was not a struggle for the “control or conquest of the State,” but stood opposed to it as the “non-State” (Coming 85). This last is a term he equates, appositionally, to nothing less than “humanity” itself. It is this lack of an identity and belonging that the state – qua state – found most intolerable in the protestors’ actions, and it is this that it was attempting to suppress. Right off, however, we should note a striking discrepancy between the “China” of the U.S.-West and the “China” within the mainland. Tiananmen remains the most emblematic event of Post-Mao China from the point of view of those living outside of the People’s Republic. In part due to state censorship, 1989 – while hardly unknown – has nowhere near the iconic status within China as it does outside. For better and for worse, and in part due to mainland state
censorship, it is simply not the Sinified analogue of, say, the Prague Spring, and within China the anonymous Tank Man is not, as he is for Time magazine, one of the last century’s greatest, most iconic heroes. My point here is not to downplay the significance of Tiananmen in an absolute sense, nor to excuse Deng Xiaoping et al. from their criminal violence. It is, though, to mark the difference between an inside and an outside, and to mark the Western fixation on an event that serves as the key event of post-Mao China and the emblem of China’s perfidy in an era when it “threatens” the U.S.-West’s political-economic dominance. But while the choice of Tiananmen is itself significant here, the larger issue is the content of what Agamben and other theorists have to say. And striking in this regard is very simply the matter of historical accuracy and, by extension, of knowledge. Whatever the merits of Agamben’s sentiments, he is uninformed when he claims that the only concrete demand of the movement was the rehabilitation of the recently deceased General Secretary, Hu Yaobang. Historians of the event concur that the student movement as a whole was actually patriotic (the youth insisted on this) and wanted above all recognition by the Communist Party – which it by and large did not oppose or demand to abdicate. Their demands included treatment as an equal, valued partner in carrying out the official state policies of modernization and reform. Within China studies, the consensus laments these characteristics, seeing in them the lack of a more Western, proceduralist understanding of democracy and civil society, and identifying this lack as the reason for the movement’s failure. So, too, the notion that this “community” lacked a representable identity would come as news to the participants, or to readers of Zhao Dingxin’s book on the subject, which thickly describes the turbulent and fractious jockeying for personal and ideological control within the leadership.9 This internal struggle within the student movement, and their external conflicts with the Party and at times with the workers’ groups on the Square, were certainly about identity and recognition as much as about ideology, policy, and social justice. Tiananmen contained the inevitable mix of factors in a protest movement and a struggle over representation. The students’ demands for the reversal of the April 26th People’s Daily editorial that called them unpatriotic, for official dialogues with CCP leaders, and for the dismissal of Premier Li Peng (who declared martial law), have to be seen as in part a struggle over identity.10 So, too, for the workers’ calls to have Deng’s and others’ finances publicized, and for their own big-character posters that (contra Agamben) made specific demands for, say, the right to form their own unions and get paid, and that moreover proclaimed themselves as the vanguard of the nation and revolution.11 Such fundamental aspects of the protest movement find no space within Agamben’s analysis of the Chinese March-to-June event, and his positing of a communal “singularity” beyond identity and against the state is simply asserted as a romantic obviousness. It is just something that is known, without the need for research and elaboration. The Tiananmen events, then, here become a floating signifier, whose only concrete meaning is precisely its rhetorical function as the historical proof of
Agamben’s conceptual work: that we are beyond the nation, that traditional forms of politics, ethics, identity, and collective struggles are anachronistic, but we are witnessing, messianically, the birth of singularities and new forms of global community. Agamben’s use of China – and he concludes his study with Tiananmen, one of the few, specific, contemporary examples in his text – must be seen not as a measured analysis of the actual events but as of a piece with the popular images of Tiananmen 1989: the Tank Man, the Goddess of Democracy statue, the spontaneous explosion of common humanity underneath the visible foreignness of China, and so forth. For Agamben, as for Hardt and Negri as discussed below, this is Tiananmen as spectacle. As Rey Chow once put it: China is that thing that “facilitates the production of surplus-value in the politics of knowledge-as-commodity”: “it becomes . . . the ‘Other’ onto which the unthinkable is projected” (87). This is, before the letter so to speak, a sharp critique of the autonomist/Deleuzian/singularity romantic theory-stream in general. But the larger point is that China – like the classical “Orient” – has often served as a screen for attempts to think the not-here, not-Western, wholly Other. So, too, as we have examined in an earlier chapter, the great majority of China studies scholarship still codes the protest movement as the birth and then termination of (bourgeois) civil society that stands opposed to the state and that is disconnected from class. Agamben’s text may be poeticizing Tiananmen, but practically speaking it ends up in that far more familiar and depoliticizing “global civil society” mode of analysis. Far closer to the events themselves would be to read the crackdown as a panicked response to the general strike emerging in Beijing due to the activities of the workers more than to the students and intellectuals on which the West fixates. The movement and the workers’ overwhelming presence in it are best seen as a class-based response to unemployment and “structural adjustments” to a formerly planned, socialist welfare system. From a Marxist or worker’s perspective, 1989 was a response to an increasing political authoritarianism linked to the state’s abdication of social welfare and a rising neo-liberalism.12 Hence the absence of an anti-state position, and rather demands for inclusion by students and workers. As for the civil society interpretation, or Agamben’s similar but more profound anti-state one, Wang Hui has argued against both on the grounds that in China, the public sphere has for a long time existed “within the state’s space” and so cannot be a “natural deterrent” to state power (China’s New Order 179-80).13 Wang consistently defends the capacity and necessity of the nation-state and socialist ideology to foster social justice in China. His own complex reading of the Tiananmen movement – couched in neutral prose – argues that its denouement was ultimately about the restoration of “links among market mechanisms that had begun to fail” in the late 1980s, and that created the social dislocations and discontent behind the protests (New Order 117). In the event, 1989 marked the coming onslaught of neo-liberalism and the eventual weakening of the state. Empire is a similar text in its Zeitgeist-style and its case for nothing less than a new communist manifesto for the global communities or “multitudes.” Hardt
and Negri revise the metaphysically anthropological mode of Agamben’s The Coming Community by emphasizing “immaterial labor” and post-Fordism, and declaring that the new global community has already arrived. But they share with Agamben a highly challenged use of China. Here, too, Tiananmen presents itself in unexpected places, again turning on what the movement lacked: this struggle, like the Intifada of 1989 and the Zapatistas’ uprising to which it is equated, is characterized above all by its “incommunicability,” or its “failure” to communicate at a “local level” and to other, global struggles. Hardt and Negri do not see this as a flaw but as a sign of the times: in the new age of empire what such struggles lack in communicability and duration they make up for in “intensity,” and point to a new (or future) type of communication based “not on resemblances but . . . differences”: “a communication of singularities” (Empire 57). And yet, the question of who is communicating what to whom goes begging. Moreover, despite or rather because of its inability to “communicate” locally or globally, Tiananmen nonetheless leaps “vertically,” “touches” “the global level,” and “attacks . . . Empire” (55, 57). This may be a poetics, but it is nonetheless odd to hear that a mass movement that spread across several provinces and rapidly mobilized much of Beijing’s population, not least through big-character posters, handbills, and pirate broadcasts, was not communicating anything – even to the Chinese. I would submit that, just as the Mao period is represented as identical to Soviet Russia (and surely Negri should know the Maoist critique of Stalinist economics14), the reference to Tiananmen is simply a convenient vehicle. It is an ahistorical proof or exemplum that functions to show the truth of “empire.” Precisely because the text seeks to convince us that the new empire, its multitudes, and their common resistances do actually exist and form a whole, it is crucial to ask what such struggles as Tiananmen, the Intifada, and so on have in common. But Tiananmen, invoked in Deleuzian language, is something that we are just supposed to know. “China” is ready-made to fit the theory in a seamless way. This logic of equivalence is again shown when the authors suggest a “parallel” between the twin “bureaucratic dictatorships” of China and Russia, and that as with the case of Russian culture during the last throes of the USSR, the “Chinese proletariat” showed “fabulous creativity” in the 1980s (278, 460n29). I leave to one side the description of elite Chinese intellectuals and artists as proletarians. While one of the merits of Empire is its avowedly synthesizing method, it is nonetheless marred by an assimilation of foreign contexts and by a lack of mediation that is rooted in the anti-dialectical sources of their thinking. What is further striking is the cursory gloss of the challenges to historicism by postcolonial critics or their antecedents, or of the challenges to orientalist historiography by, say, Edward Said or Andre Gunder Frank. If in their major programs of research Said and Frank threw down major challenges to how we have written the history of the Other, then this is a call that, in the current conjuncture, most producers of knowledge and new theory simply do not hear. As I have argued elsewhere, the type of “theorizing” within Empire and some of the other texts examined here indexes material transformations within intellectual labor
and the larger economy. These traits reveal an increase in the force of abstraction within thought under contemporary capitalism, a development that goes hand in hand with the expansion of the commodity relation into more and more spheres of intellectual life and the speeding-up of intellectual labor. But more to the point right now: Empire’s refusal to engage with concrete situations and political events is crucial for establishing its chain of equivalence between Soviet Russia, 1980s China, the Intifada, and “Seattle.” It is what produces the concept of a decentered, non-national, and global empire encompassing everything. As Zhang Xudong has argued, this concept of empire is also a “normative” one grounded by “a voluntarist and ahistorical Left vision of global utopia,” and not the empirically true one they claim (2004, 47). To which we can also add that China, be it of the Great Leap or the 1980s, can really make no difference in this analysis. In recent writings on totalitarianism, Lenin, and the state of the “global Left,” Žižek (to take a rather different wing of cultural theory) displays a similar use of China. The reference is most often to the Cultural Revolution, which reduces to the stereotype of entranced “Red Guards ecstatically destroying old historical monuments . . . desecrating old paintings,” and to Mao’s emperor-like “extreme” pursuit of “full personal power,” after which he quickly restores order (2001b). For Žižek, what this image proves, against the Chairman and Stalin (whom he thoughtlessly equates), is the proper autonomy of the “sphere of material production”; if the latter is subordinated to “the terrain of political battle or logic,” it can only result in “terror” (2001a, 139). Totalitarianism, in this view, is the result of the primacy of the political over the economic, and not the other way around (as Hannah Arendt would have it). Žižek thus uses China to counter the misuse of totalitarianism as a politically quietist notion devoid of economic mediation. Yet the more salient, useful points about this slipshod concept are not broached: that in the case of China, where genuinely popular Maoist mobilizations were as common as conflicts within the party and society, the attribution of totalitarianism implies “brainwashing” and oriental-despotic control of a perennially passive populace. It is not a critical concept so much as part of colonial discourse.15 That China was and is totalitarian, that its populace is largely quiet, passively suffering, and state controlled even when it is rebelling, is a standard part of orientalist common sense and area studies discourse. But it is contradicted by, for example, China’s long history of peasant rebellions, the “mass democracy,” strikes, and so forth of the Cultural Revolution, the new regime’s widely felt legitimacy through the early 1970s at least, and the skyrocketing of mass incidents since the 1980s.16 What we have here, then, is not an interrogation of Arendt and others or of China, but a dressed-up “vulgar” Marxism that emphasizes the primacy of the productive forces over the relations of production. Žižek thus shares this belief with Deng Xiaoping and Soviet or Stalinist Marxists. As it was for them, it remains a strongly depoliticizing type of rationality that is just as quietist as “totalitarianism.” Whatever else one might say of his critique of Arendt, the point here is that his uses of China have little to do with what the Cultural Revolution
was really like. Thus, his notion that Mao was only after full personal power is belied by the fact that by late 1967 Mao had already resecured that. This leaves Žižek with nine-tenths of the complex era to account for. This is Mao as despot and not historical figure, thinker, or rational political leader. It comes as no surprise, then, that Žižek can cite a pulp-orientalist biography as an authoritative text on the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s thought.17 Another indication of superficiality or flippancy here would be Žižek’s parallel between Mao dissolving the Shanghai Commune during the CR, and Lacan’s closing his École Freudienne (which is also chronologically wrong). It must also be said that when he writes on the Cultural Revolution as a hopeless entanglement of politics and economics (the “terror” of politics in command of production) he reproduces a key element of colonial discourse. As George Steinmetz has noted (22-3), characterizing premodern and socialist societies as muddled, confused, and backward in this way – as opposed to the rationally differentiated spheres of the West – has long been a staple of orientalist thought. One might easily contrast Žižek’s work on China with, for example, Arif Dirlik’s and others’ interpretation of the Cultural Revolution. Dirlik argues that the CR and Maoism must be thought through rather than merely demonized or dismissed:
In a historical perspective that takes them seriously as events in the history of modernity, however, the same events appear otherwise: as the constituents of a final effort – the most impressive of all such efforts – to create an alternative Third World modernity based on socialism.
